Looking Back: The CDG wing idea that never materialised

An interesting idea in 2005:

FIA began to look for car shapes that might create a wake in which a following car would gain an advantage, as in the old slipstream days.

In 2005 FIA President Max Mosley commissioned his former partner Nick Wirth, a designer who had worked with the Simtek and Renault F1 teams, to come up with an idea of how to lower aerodynamic turbulence behind the cars and by doing so create more overtaking. Wirth worked with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) programmes to come up with what he called the Centreline Downwash Generating (CDG) wing. The FIA announced that it would introduce the CDG wing in 2008.

At the time the Technical Working Group, working with the Grand Prix Manufacturers’ Association (GPMA) used the Italian Fondtech wind tunnel, run by former Ferrari and Tyrrell aerodynamicist Jean-Claude Migeot, to see if the CDG wing would work. Migeot and his team concluded that the idea was flawed. By the autumn of 2006 no-one had much confidence in the CDG wing and Mosley agreed that its introduction could be delayed and that the Technical Working Group should come up with a better idea for 2009. – Grandprix.com